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Lac Megantic - Blackened debris, twisted metal and gas leaks hampered rescue workers' search for perhaps dozens of bodies on Tuesday, three days after a runaway oil train smashed into this small lakeside town and incinerated homes, a library and a crowded bar.

Thirteen people were confirmed dead and nearly 40 others were still missing in a catastrophe that raised questions about the safety of transporting oil by rail instead of pipeline.

Investigators were zeroing in on whether a blaze on the same train a few hours before the disaster set off the deadly chain of events.

Rescue workers laboured to reach the bodies believed to be in the ruins.

"Those sectors are extremely complicated to investigate. There is debris. This is a very risky environment. We have to secure the safety of those working there. We have some hotspots on the scene. There is some gas," Quebec provincial police sergeant Benoit Richard said.

He said recovery efforts had to be halted briefly on Monday for health reasons, and some officers had to be removed from the scene. He did not elaborate. The bodies that have been recovered were burned so badly they have yet to be identified.

The Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway train broke loose early Saturday, speeding downhill nearly 11km and jumping the tracks at 101km/h in Lac-Megantic, near the Maine border, investigators said. All but one of the 73 cars were carrying oil. At least five exploded.

The blasts destroyed about 30 buildings, including the Musi-Cafe, a popular bar that was filled at the time, and forced about a third of the town's 6 000 residents from their homes. Much of the area where the bar stood was burned to the ground. Burned-out cars dotted the landscape.

Earlier fire

The same train caught fire hours earlier in a nearby town, and the engine was shut down - standard operating procedure dictated by the train's owners, Nantes Fire Chief Patrick Lambert said.

Edward Burkhardt, president and CEO of the railway's parent company, Rail World, suggested that shutting off the locomotive to put out the fire might have disabled the brakes.

"An hour or so after the locomotive was shut down, the train rolled away," he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Lambert defended the fire department, saying that the blaze was extinguished within about 45 minutes and that's when firefighters' involvement ended.

"The people from MMA told us, 'That's great - the train is secure, there's no more fire, there's nothing any more, there's no more danger,'" Lambert said. "We were given our leave, and we left."

"The extent to which [the fire] played into the sequences of events is a focal point of our investigation," Ross said, but he cautioned that the investigation was still in its early stages.

The accident has also thrown a spotlight on MMA's safety record.

Before the Lac-Megantic accident, the company had 34 derailments since 2003, five of them resulting in damage of more than $100 000, according to the US Federal Railroad Administration.

Misleading

Burkhardt, however, said the figures were misleading.

"They're not apples-to-apples figures. This is the only significant mainline derailment this company has had in the last 10 years. We've had, like most railroads, a number of smallish incidents, usually involving accidents in yard trackage and industry trackage," he told CBC in a TV interview.

Ross told The Associated Press that the tanker cars involved in the crash were the DOT-111 model. The DOT-111 is a staple of the American freight rail fleet whose flaws have been noted as far back as a 1991 safety study.

Among other things, experts say its steel shell is so thin that it is prone to puncture in an accident, potentially spilling cargo that can catch fire, explode or contaminate the environment.

The derailment also raised questions about the safety of Canada's growing practice of transporting oil by train, and is sure to bolster arguments in favour of a proposed oil pipeline running from Canada across the US - a project that Canadian officials badly want.

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